Tag Archives: steampunk

We’ve been making steampunk airships incased in snow sparkle globes for quite a few years, and like to think we’ve gotten better over time. Experience is an excellent teacher, although the tuition can be high.

Early airships …

More recent airships …

One question we get asked at shows is: can you make a smaller blimp? The large airships are usually in a glass globe with a diameter of about five inches. But we also have our tiny globes that measure just over two inches across. There was NO way to get an airship into a globe with an opening that small.

Until we happened upon a vintage necklace at a thrift shop and thought: those beads sure look like a zeppelin. Did it take way too long to make this tiny ship with its tiny rigging of single golden threads? Of course it does, but you know, ship happens.

Take one BIG-wheeled vintage bicycle and add a rider, gears, chains and mysterious mechanical modifications and you have a unique means of transportation, or as we like to call it: “Steampunk My Ride.”

Obviously, if BIG is good, then BIGGER is BETTER, so this Penny Farthing bike just kept getting modified until the rider seems nearly an afterthought. (This seems a bit like modern technology, where the Internet seems to think it can function without any human interference sometimes, we’re SUCH a bother to higher intelligence.)

One of a kind (ooak) water globe (or snow globe) featuring a modified “penny farthing” or old-fashioned big wheeled bicycle and tiny rider. When shaken, the interior sculpture shimmers with copper and metallic-colored micro-dust, which sparkles and slowly settles on the scene. The base is finished with a wrapped leather-look strip embellished with a swirl of brass rivets, mimicking the movement of the wheels and gears on the bike.

All my life I have been fascinated with miniatures, from dollhouses to tiny souvenir buildings, to the worlds within snowglobes.

At many art galleries and shows, I wondered why I never saw snowglobes presented as art, and I began to experiment with making tiny sculptures to place inside globes. In addition, with the rich metallics, brass, leather and wood of my designs, “snow” did not seem right, so the floating glitter in this liquid is copper, gold, silver, and rich pewter in tone, glimmering as it sinks and swirls slowly.

The result is my collection, Camryn Forrest Designs. I hope you enjoy them.

Talking to a physicist, he mentioned once that he thought Tesla could do anything, he simply lacked the marketing machine that Thomas Edison had. I thought about this and wondered “just what COULD Tesla do?”

I liked the idea that science and invention could “mend a broken heart” as well as be used for more obvious goals.